In the past, when posting to the different threads about Linux distributions, I have expressed my distaste with Slackware Linux. In fact, I have said I despise Slackware. I’ve also mentioned my frequent quest to find a distro other than Mandrake that I like.
Well, I ran out of distros that I wanted to try and, on one of my frequent visits to ibiblio.org, saw the Slackware link and I tried to remember why I hated Slackware so much. I couldn’t remember, so I decided to give it a shot.
I ran Slackware Linux for a couple weeks on a replacement laptop while my main one was getting repaired. I liked it. A lot. Not more than Mandrake, but if I couldn’t get Mandrake, Slackware is the one I would use now. Which made me want to know why I hated it before.
I realized I never hated Slackware. I just refused to try it because the name reminded me of that damn Slackers movie. And I truly hated that movie.
Just wanted to take back anything bad I ever said about Slackware. It’s a great distro with all the functionality and few of the bells and whistles. And the swaret tool is terrific. More straightforward than apt-get and easier to understand. Not as impressive as the Gentoo portage or BSD emerge, but still impressive. Swaret definitely beats urpmi.
Talk about a mis-named distro, Slack is anything but a slackers O/S , if anything , mandrake is the slackers distro. The one thing that I liked about slack , was that when your doing your own compiling , everything is where its supposed to be. Mandrake is a nightmare if you have no background in command line, making symbolic links, Urpmi is your freind.
Never tried swaret, slack only lasted all of about a week on my system ,before I went back to drake. Slack is not for everyone , but everyone should at least try it once , just to see the difference.
Linux is really going to go two tracks , one is gonna be slack or a derivative, and drake,suse and the like for the person who wants more GUI functionality.
I am a total daimbramage case when it comes to computers, but I liked suse when I used a trial disc for a couple weeks until I got my OS problem straightened out early in the spring…I loaded it onto an ancient IBM thinkpad 365 and got my email and internet jones fed nicely, and believe me, that was a seriously gimp computer…my palm m500 is zippier than that poor laptop is…
I am really wishing that evercrack would run under linux…I never had any issue running suse…nothing like running window$